10 of the biggest sequels from famous authors | indy100 10 of the biggest sequels from famous authors Posted by Evan Bartlett in news Upvote Upvoted Harper Lee has just announced a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird after more than 50 years (Picture: Getty) Harper Lee announced on Tuesday she will be releasing her second book - a full 50 years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird was published. Go Set a Watchman, which was actually completed in the 1950s and re-found in the Autumn will be released in July. Here are 10 other famous authors who have released literary sequels: The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien Popular trilogy which was published after Tolkien's wildly popular novel The Hobbit. Closing Time by Joseph Heller Sequel to Heller's 1961 novel Catch 22. Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel Booker Prize-winning sequel to the author's Wolf Hall. Ulysses by James Joyce In part, follows the character of Stephen Dedalus - first seen in James Joyce's debut novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris A sequel featuring cannibalistic doctor Hannibal Lecter, first seen in Harris' Red Dragon. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll A sequel of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which follows another Alice who enters another fantasy world. The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne Sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Paradise Regained by John Milton A follow up to the 17th century epic poem Paradise Lost. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain The celebrated sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe Seen as the second novel in Achebe's "African trilogy" following Things Fall Apart. What are your favourite (or least favourite) literary sequels? Let us know in the comments below. Closing time : a novel (Book, 1994) [WorldCat.org] New York : Simon & Schuster, ©1994. Edition/Format: Print book : Fiction : English View all editions and formats Database: WorldCat Summary: A sequel to Catch-22, the 1961 humorous bestseller about a group of American airmen during World War II.

The novel follows many of the same characters in their current escapades--mainly to do with selling defense equipment to the Pentagon. In addition, there are their views on the decline of America. Rating: Closing Time | novel by Heller | Britannica.com novel by Heller THIS IS A DIRECTORY PAGE. Britannica does not currently have an article on this topic. Learn about this topic in these articles: in American literature: Realism and “metafiction” ...nightmarish implications. In Catch-22 (1961), Joseph Heller satirized the military mentality with surreal black comedy but also injected a sense of Kafkaesque horror. A sequel, Closing Time (1994), was an elegy for the World War II generation. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), described the Allied firebombing of the German city of... Catch-22 | novel by Heller | Britannica.com novel by Heller War and Peace Catch-22, satirical novel by Joseph Heller , first published in 1961.

The plot of the novel centres on the antihero Captain John Yossarian , stationed at an airstrip on a Mediterranean island in World War II , and portrays his desperate attempts to stay alive. The “catch” in Catch-22 involves a mysterious Air Force regulation which asserts that a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but that if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. The term catch-22 thereafter entered the English language with the meaning “a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem” and later developed several additional senses. In 1994 Heller published a sequel entitled Closing Time , which detailed the later lives of the characters established in Catch-22. Learn More in these related articles: Joseph Heller May 1, 1923 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. December 12, 1999 East Hampton, New York American writer whose novel Catch-22 (1961) was one of the most significant works of protest literature to appear after World War II.

The satirical novel was a popular success, and a film version appeared in 1970. in American literature: Realism and “metafiction” ...novelists, profoundly shaken by the bombing of Hiroshima and the real threat of human annihilation, found the conventions of realism inadequate for treating the war’s nightmarish implications. In Catch-22 (1961), Joseph Heller satirized the military mentality with surreal black comedy but also injected a sense of Kafkaesque horror. A sequel, Closing Time (1994), was... 7 References found in Britannica Articles Assorted References discussed in biography (in Joseph Heller ) character of Corrections? Updates? Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback. MEDIA FOR: You have successfully emailed this. Error when sending the email. Try again later. Edit Mode Submit Tips For Editing We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Encyclopædia Britannica articles are written in a neutral objective tone for a general audience. You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered.

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Close Date Published: November 20, 2011 URL: Access Date: January 18, 2017 Share 11 Book Sequels You Probably Didn't Know Existed | Mental Floss 11 Book Sequels You Probably Didn't Know Existed filed under: books Like us on Facebook We get frustrated with Hollywood's propensity for weird sequels that seem to have little or nothing to do with the original, but it just so happens that the practice is older than filmmaking itself. Several classic stories have strange follow-ups you've never heard of, like... 1. The Starlight Barking In case you're unaware, Disney's 101 Dalmatians was actually based on a novel, The Hundred and One Dalmatians, by Dodie Smith. You may also be further unaware that Smith wrote her own sequel that Disney ignored, titled The Starlight Barking. Instead of just being a rehash of the original, Smith's story takes a very bizarre turn and involves all the world's dogs finding every living thing besides themselves in a form of stasis caused by a dog-like alien named Sirius, who invites them all to abandon Earth and join him on the Dog Star. 2.

The Giver Trilogy An extremely popular book for middle school students, Lois Lowry's The Giver has become an instant classic in the 20 years since its publication. Countless children have been assigned essays about how they interpreted the book's ambiguous ending, but they could have saved some time and just read the book's two (with a third on the way) sequels instead. The first sequel, Gathering Blue, is only tangentially related to The Giver by being set in the same universe. However, the following book, Messenger, ties the two together and features the return of Jonas, the main character from The Giver, who obviously did not freeze to death at the end of that book. 3. The Book of the Green Planet Although Steven Spielberg had every intention of creating a sequel to 1982's movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, things never really came together for it, and now, 30 years later, it looks extremely unlikely that it will ever see the light of day. Unless you read the semi-official novelized sequel, that is. William Kotzwinkle, who wrote the novelization of the original film, published The Book of the Green Planet in 1985.

In it, E.T. returns to his home planet of Vomestra, where he's punished for his trip to Earth and, thanks to a telepathic link, finds that Elliot has begun to grow up and forget the lessons learned from their time together. 4. Little Men & Jo's Boys Louisa May Alcott's classic, Little Women, is actually already two books in the first place, with the first volume being Little Women and the second being Good Wives, but since they're usually compiled anyway, that hardly counts as a sequel. Luckily for this list, Alcott also produced two actual sequels, Little Men and Jo's Boys. Little Men revolves around a group of young orphans who are students at a school run by two characters from Little Women, Jo March and her husband, Professor Friedrich. Jo's Boys, a direct sequel to Little Men, features the orphans as adults and shows how their lives changed as a result of interacting with the March family. 5. Closing Time Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was one of the most popular novels of the 20th century, so much so that it even spawned the term "catch-22" as an everyday phrase.

But what's not so popular is the book's sequel, Closing Time, published more than 30 years later. Since the original book was about World War II, long over by that time and not as ingrained into the cultural consciousness as it had been, Heller instead sets the sequel in '90s-era New York City, showing how various characters from the original novel deal with the difficulties of old age and their own mortality. 6. Paradise Regained Whether you've read it or not, John Milton's Paradise Lost is one of the most influential works ever created. In fact, Milton's poem is responsible for a large percentage of common misconceptions regarding the contents of the Bible, meaning that it not only changed the face of English literature, but Western religion as well. What failed to make nearly so much of a splash is Milton's follow-up poem, Paradise Regained, which was published in 1671, four years after Paradise Lost. As opposed to the original's 12 books, Regained is a mere four. It tells the story of Jesus' temptation by Satan as seen in the Book of Luke, but the poem never really caught on like the original and is widely unknown today. 7.

The Tom Sawyer Series Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is one of the most read books in America today, and it's not exactly a secret that Twain later had Sawyer return in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But these weren't the only two adventures the boys had. Twain actually published two other novels in the series, both more than a decade later. The first, Tom Sawyer Abroad, features Huck, Tom, and Jim attempting to cross the ocean in a hot air balloon while facing numerous hurdles along the way. After that came Tom Sawyer, Detective, which has Tom and Huck attempting to solve a mystery involving stolen diamonds and a possible murder. Further, Twain had three incomplete Tom Sawyer novels --Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, Schoolhouse Hill, and Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy, the last of which was very nearly completed. 8. The Gone With the Wind Sequels Margaret Mitchell's beloved Southern romance was not only one of the most famous books of the last century, but also spawned one of the most popular films to boot. Oddly, it took nearly 60 years for people to try to wring more cash out of it. The book has four sequels, with varying levels of authenticity.

The first, Scarlett, was an authorized sequel by Alexandra Ripley and was widely panned. A second that ignores Scarlett, Rhett Butler's People, is a re-telling of the original novel from Butler's point of view by author Donald McCraig. Then there are the unauthorized sequels: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall is a satirical re-telling from the perspective of an O'Hara family slave. Finally, The Winds of Tara by Katherine Pinotti is a direct sequel to the original that the Mitchell family legally blocked from publication in America. 9. The Second Jungle Book Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book is as famous for its Disney animated adaptation as it is for its common usage in elementary school curricula. The book, which is actually just a series of tangentially related short stories, is one of the most well-known and popular in the English language today. A year after The Jungle Book's release, Kipling wrote a follow-up book called The Second Jungle Book, featuring five further adventures of Mowgli and his friends. Although Disney made an animated Jungle Book 2 and a live-action film called The Second Jungle Book: Mowgli and Baloo, neither actually follows the plot of The Second Jungle Book. 10.

The Last Ringbearer J.R.R. Tolkien's sprawling Middle Earth series covers more than a dozen books, several of which were published after his death. Of all of his extant materials, however, one culture's history is mostly ignored--that of the people of Mordor. True, they're the bad guys, but shouldn't they get a say? That's the premise behind Russian author Kirill Yeskov's unauthorized sequel, The Last Ringbearer . While it's not an official sequel, the book is actually fairly popular on its own merits . Yeskov presents Mordor as a highly advanced society based around science and technology. Not unlike Gregory Maguire's Wicked, The Last Ringbearer argues that " history is written by the winners " and that Mordor was actually a victim of the primitive cultures of men who blindly followed the Luddite-esque Gandalf. 11. The Amityville Saga You probably knew from the various films' advertising campaigns that The Amityville Horror was based on a true story. How much is true is, naturally, a matter of contention.

But, while the first film (and its remake) was based on the purported experiences of George and Kathy Lutz and the second film was loosely based on the actual DeFeo murders that occurred in the house, all the rest of the films are wholly fictional. The Amityville books, however, tell a different tale. The Lutz family claimed that their paranormal experiences didn't end when they left 112 Ocean Avenue. According to The Amityville Horror Part II, the demonic forces continued to plague them at Kathy's mother's house. A second sequel, Amityville: The Final Chapter, that also claims to be true, says that the haunting even followed them to California. Other books followed, some even featuring the Lutz family, but all were acknowledged as fictional. BOOK REVIEW / Yossarian the insider dealer: 'Closing Time' - Joseph Heller: Simon & Schuster, 14.99 pounds: Joseph Heller has written a sequel to Catch-22. Scott Bradfield wonders why | The Independent BOOK REVIEW / Yossarian the insider dealer: 'Closing Time' - Joseph Heller: Simon & Schuster, 14.99 pounds: Joseph Heller has written a sequel to Catch-22.

Scott Bradfield wonders why Friday 30 September 1994 23:02 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture THE CATCH, of course, is that there aren't many characters left standing to write a sequel about. By the end of Catch-22 (1961) Kraft, Clavinger, McWatt and Nately have been snuffed out in various combat missions, Hungry Joe's been suffocated in the night by Huple's cat, Dunbar's been 'disappeared' for threatening the lives of his commanding officers, and Kid Sampson has been crudely bisected on the beach by an Allied aircraft. According to Yossarian, who has pledged 'to live forever or die in the attempt', anybody who wants you dead is the 'enemy.' And the enemy isn't just on their side anymore; the enemy is everywhere. There are no fates actually worse than death in Catch-22, but there are a few that certainly come close. For instance, there's Milo Minderbinder's rapacious M&M Enterprises, serving chocolate-covered cotton balls in the Mess or making profitable deals with the Germans to bomb Allied airfields.

Or there's Major Major Major Major's officerial stage-fright, or Doc Daneeka's lapse into bureaucratic zombie-ism, or even the harried Chaplain, placed under house arrest for stealing plum tomatoes and impersonating Washington Irving. But probably the very worst way to go on living, Yossarian eventually learns, is to be accepted by the bastards who actually run things - the Colonel Karns and Cathcarts, the General Peckems and Dreedles. At the conclusion of Catch-22, Yossarian is offered a promotion and an honourable discharge, but only if he accepts this one little 'catch.' 'Like us,' Colonel Korn wheedles. 'Join us. Be our pal. Say nice things about us.' Given that his only choice is between dying or opting-in, Yossarian radically opts-out of the decision- making process altogether and sets off in the first available yellow raft for Sweden. Like most American fictional heroes, from Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield and Randle Patrick McMurphy, Yossarian flees the world he's always known and sets out for the places he's never been.

It's something of a disappointment, then, to catch up with Yossarian nearly 50 years after the events related in Catch-22 only to learn that one of literature's premier escape-artists has become the ultimate insider-trader. Washed up on the shores not of Sweden, but of contemporary Manhattan, the greying Yossarian of Closing Time is working on his second divorce, attending Board of Directors meetings for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and peddling influence for Milo Minderbinder's defence contracting firm, which is trying to sell the government more over-priced bombers it doesn't need. Since the Second World War, Yossarian has been an arbitrageur, an investment banker, a public relations consultant, and a freelance writer (one of the running 'jokes' of this book is that Yossarian's always planning to submit another story to the New Yorker, even though they're always summarily rejecting him). He still runs after women, he confesses to his doctor, 'but not too hard'. Now that Yossarian's on the inside, it's not so easy to laugh along with him at how crazy the world has got.

The central 'gag' of this novel, for example, is Yossarian's comic intention of staging an exorbitant wedding ceremony for New York's wealthiest elite at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which is infested with bag-people, women being customarily raped in corridors, and people Yossarian refers to as 'aspiring child prostitutes'. When the wedding is held, in the novel's final pages, and after millions have been spent on oysters, haberdashery and sanitary engineers, one public-relations spokesperson exclaims: 'This was the kind of event that makes one proud to be homeless in New York.' He's not homeless, of course, and that's the joke. But it's hard to tell who will laugh at it, and whose side, exactly, they're on. Closing Time stinks of a sentimental liberal piety which at times seems to be masquerading as moral philosophy. Yossarian repeatedly bemoans the craziness and sadness of the world, and what a mess everything is, and how awful that we're all going to die etc, but underneath it all aren't we just glad to be alive?

So let's dance, and drink, and make love, and blah blah blah, like Zorba the Greek dancing his heart out at Studio 54 and snorting designer cocaine. Because Closing Time can generate no comic momentum of its own, characters are always recollecting, in very stilted dialogue, major highlights from Catch-22. Consider the following exchange between Yossarian and Sam Singer: ' 'You remember Snowden, then, Howard Snowden? On that mission to Avignon?' 'Sam, could I ever forget? I would have used up all the morphine in the first-aid kit when I saw him in such pain. That fucking Milo. (Milo had replaced the morphine supplies with stock certificates for M&M Enterprises.) I cursed him a lot. Now I work with him.' 'Did I really black out that much?' 'It looked that way to me.' 'That seems funny now. You were covered with so much blood. And then all that other stuff. He just kept moaning. He was cold, wasn't he?' 'Yes, he said he was cold. And dying.

I was covered with everything, Sammy, and then with my own vomit too.' 'And then you took off your clothes and wouldn't put them on again for a while.' 'I was sick of uniforms.' 'I saw you sitting in a tree at the funeral, naked . . . I saw Milo climb up to you too, with his chocolate- covered cotton. . .' ' There is an awful lot of this sort of stuff. It goes on for hundreds of pages, like a Really Advanced Master Class in how not to write exposition. Where Snowden's death in Catch- 22 recirculated hypnotically as a memory of the intimate blood everybody's afraid of losing, in Closing Time former events are ceaselessly recounted in order to remind people that a much better book was once written by the same author. (Photograph omitted) Joseph Heller’s “Closing Time” (David Louis Edelman) Joseph Heller’s “Closing Time” March 21, 1995 @ 12:00 pm This book review was originally published on Critics’ Choice on March 21, 1995.

World War II bombardier John Yossarian wants to know if he can be exempt from flying any more missions because he’s insane. Of course, comes the reply, but in order to be declared insane you have to consult a doctor, and only someone of compos mentis would consult a doctor. Catch-22. Here’s another one: an aging novelist wants to end his career with a novel as brilliant and innovative as his first. But the only way he can be truly original is by pirating from the first book, which makes him just another has-been stuck in a slump. Sadly enough, that’s the predicament novelist Joseph Heller has written himself into with his new novel, Closing Time, which publisher Simon & Schuster is billing as the sequel to his groundbreaking 1961 work Catch-22. A sprawling domestic satire that tracks down Catch protagonist John Yossarian fifty years later, Closing Time pales not only in comparison to the rest of the Heller oeuvre, but to many of his imitators’ works as well.

The Yossarian we meet in Closing Time has decided, after a lifetime of lifeless copy writing and advertising jobs, to throw ethics to the wind and help old World War II cohort Milo Minderbinder sell his M & M E & A Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive Second-Strike Offensive Attack Bomber to the government. Yossarian quells his ethical dilemmas by reasoning that a) Milo won’t actually build the bomber once he’s got the money for it, b) Yossarian will probably be dead before the first plane makes it off the assembly line, and c) Milo’s paying him good money. Yossarian only moonlights as a war profiteer, however. He’s also in charge of planning the most expensive, wasteful wedding ever to grace the Big Apple, and he’s decided to stage it at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. With an exorbitant million-dollar wedding cake and a cast of actors playing the various prostitutes, thugs, and drug pushers that normally inhabit the terminal, the wedding gives Heller ample opportunity to display his trademark venom at the absurdities of twentieth-century life. Unfortunately, Heller chose to mix the narratives of two additional protagonists with the further adventures of John Yossarian.

These chapters devoted to fellow septuagenarians Sammy Singer and Lew Rabinowitz move by at a snail’s pace, filled mostly with tedious reminiscences about the heyday of Coney Island and whining Andy Rooneyesque diatribes about the state of today’s youth. Heller’s main problem in concocting a sequel to Catch-22, however, is that its predecessor was too successful. Back in the early ’60s before civil disobedience became fashionable, the idea of, say, Yossarian sitting naked in a tree during a fellow pilot’s funeral was unbelievably caustic and biting. In the ’90s, that type of wit has become the mainstream in humor. Today you can get something equally raw from your garden-variety cable comedian, or even a mediocre episode of “The Simpsons.” There’s also a strange sense of ironic self-awareness running through Closing Time that gives the book an aura of recycled goods.

Winking references are made to Catch-22s and a writer named “Joey Heller”; Rabinowitz rubs elbows with the author’s old buddy, Kurt Vonnegut, in the maple syrup factories of Dresden, Germany; even Yossarian’s courtship of his nurse bears striking resemblance to the real-life courtship of Heller and his nurse related in the autobiographical No Laughing Matter. So what’s left? Plenty of jokes directed at the video game junky Vice-President with the Secret Service code name “Little Prick,” who’s obviously supposed to be Dan Quayle. (Haven’t we all heard enough of those jokes?) There’s also a smattering of the old vaudevillian Heller dialogues, such as this one in which Milo Minderbinder and pals go to bat for his stealth bomber before a government commission: “And what does a flying wing look like?” “Other flying wings,” Wintergreen interposed adroitly, with Milo struck dumb by a query he had not anticipated. “And what do other flying wings look like?” “Our flying wing,” answered Milo, his composure restored. “Will it look,” asked a major, “like the old Stealth?” “No.

Only in appearance.” Scenes like the previous one show that Heller can still be lots of fun when he wants to. But most of the rest of Closing Time is neither fun nor particularly insightful, and the book’s apocalyptic ending — curiously swiped from the Stanley Kubrick/Terry Southern film Dr. Strangelove — is an exercise in depression without purpose. Joseph Heller was right in the introductory note to his first novel: there’s only one catch, and that’s Catch-22. Filed Under 9780684804507: Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22 - AbeBooks - Heller, Joseph: 0684804506 About this title A darkly comic and ambitious sequel to the American classic Catch-22. In Closing Time, Joseph Heller returns to the characters of Catch-22, now coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II: Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and such newcomers as little Sammy Singer and giant Lew, all linked, in an uneasy peace and old age, fighting not the Germans this time, but The End.

Closing Time deftly satirizes the realities and the myths of America in the half century since WWII: the absurdity of our politics, the decline of our society and our great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of our business and culture -- with the same ferocious humor as Catch-22. Closing Time is outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as Catch-22 itself, a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. About the Author: Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. In 1961, he published Catch-22, which became a bestseller and, in 1970, a film. He went on to write such novels as Good as Gold, God Knows, Picture This, Closing Time (the sequel to Catch-22), and Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. Heller died in December 1999. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission.

All rights reserved.: Chapter 1 Sammy When people our age speak of the war it is not of Vietnam but of the one that broke out more than half a century ago and swept in almost all the world. It was raging more than two years before we even got into it. More than twenty million Russians, they say, had perished by the time we invaded at Normandy. The tide had already been turned at Stalingrad before we set foot on the Continent, and the Battle of Britain had already been won. Yet a million Americans were casualties of battle before it was over -- three hundred thousand of us were killed in combat. Some twenty-three hundred alone died at Pearl Harbor on that single day of infamy almost half a century back -- more than twenty-five hundred others were wounded -- a greater number of military casualties on just that single day than the total in all but the longest, bloodiest engagements in the Pacific, more than on D day in France. No wonder we finally went in. Thank God for the atom bomb, I rejoiced with the rest of the civilized Western world, almost half a century ago, when I read the banner newspaper headlines and learned it had exploded.

By then I was already back and out, unharmed and, as an ex-GI, much better off than before. I could go to college. I did go and even taught college for two years in Pennsylvania, then returned to New York and in a while found work as an advertising copywriter in the promotion department of Time magazine. In only twenty years from now, certainly not longer, newspapers across the country will be printing photographs of their oldest local living veterans of that war who are taking part in the sparse parades on the patriotic holidays. The parades are sparse already. I never marched. I don't think my father did either. Way, way back, when I was still a kid, crazy Henry Markowitz, an old janitor of my father's generation in the apartment house across the street, would, on Armistice Day and Memorial Day, dig out and don his antique World War I army uniform, even down to the ragged leggings of the earlier Great War, and all that day strut on the sidewalk back and forth from the Norton's Point trolley tracks on Railroad Avenue to the candy store and soda fountain at the corner of Surf Avenue, which was nearer the ocean.

Showing off, old Henry Markowitz -- like my father back then, old Henry Markowitz probably was not much past forty -- would bark commands out till hoarse to the tired women trudging home on thick legs to their small apartments carrying brown bags from the grocery or butcher, who paid him no mind. His two embarrassed daughters ignored him too, little girls, the younger my own age, the other a year or so older. He was shell-shocked, some said, but I do not think that was true. I do not think we even knew what shell-shocked meant. There were no elevators then in our brick apartment houses, which were three and four stories high, and for the aging and the elderly, climbing steps, going home, could be hell.

In the cellars you'd find coal, delivered by truck and spilled noisily by gravity down a metal chute; you'd find a furnace and boiler, and also a janitor, who might live in the building or not and whom, in intimidation more than honor, we always spoke of respectfully by his surname with the title "Mister," because he kept watch for the landlord, of whom almost all of us then, as some of us now, were always at least a little bit in fear. Just one easy mile away was the celebrated Coney Island amusement area with its gaudy lightbulbs in the hundreds of thousands and the games and rides and food stands. Luna Park was a big and famous attraction then, and so was the Steeplechase ("Steeplechase -- the Funny Place") Park of a Mr. George C. Tilyou, who had passed away long before and of whom no one knew much.

Bold on every front of Steeplechase was the unforgettable trademark, a striking, garish picture in cartoon form of the grotesque, pink, flat, grinning face of a subtly idiotic man, practically on fire with a satanic hilarity and showing, incredibly, in one artless plane, a mouth sometimes almost a city block wide and an impossible and startling number of immense teeth. The attendants wore red jackets and green jockey caps and many smelled of whiskey. Tilyon had lived on Sorf Avenue in his own private house, a substantial wooden structure with a walkway to the stoop from a short flight of stone steps that descended right to the margin of the sidewalk and appeared to be sinking. By the time I was old enough to walk past on my way to the public library, subway station, or Saturday movie matinee, his family name, which had been set in concrete on the vertical face of the lowest step, was already sloping out of kilter and submerged more than halfway into the ground. In my own neighborhood, the installation of oil burners, with the excavations into the pavement for pipes and fuel tanks, was unfailingly a neighborhood event, a sign of progress.

In those twenty more years we will all look pretty bad in the newspaper pictures and television clips, kind of strange, like people in a different world, ancient and doddering, balding, seeming perhaps a little bit idiotic, shrunken, with toothless smiles in collapsed, wrinkled cheeks. People I know are already dying and others I've known are already dead. We don't look that beautiful now. We wear glasses and are growing hard of hearing, we sometimes talk too much, repeat ourselves, things grow on us, even the most minor bruises take longer to heal and leave telltale traces. And soon after that there will be no more of us left. Only records and mementos for others, and the images they chance to evoke.

Someday one of the children -- I adopted them legally, with their consent, of course -- or one of my grown grand-children may happen upon my gunner's wings or Air Medal, my shoulder patch of sergeant's stripes, or that boyish snapshot of me -- little Sammy Singer, the best speller of his age in Coney Island and always near the top of his grade in arithmetic, elementary algebra, and plane geometry -- in my fleecy winter flight jacket and my parachute harness, taken overseas close to fifty years back on the island of Pianosa off the western shore of Italy. We are sitting with smiles for the camera near a plane in early daylight on a low stack of unfused thousand-pound bombs, waiting for the signal to start up for another mission, with our bombardier for that day, a captain, I remember, looking on at us from the background. He was a rambunctious and impulsive Armenian, often a little bit frightening, unable to learn how to navigate in the accelerated course thrown at him unexpectedly in operational training at the air base in Columbia, South Carolina, where a group of us had been brought together as a temporary crew to train for combat and fly a plane overseas into a theater of war.

The pilot was a sober Texan named Appleby, who was very methodical and very good, God bless him, and the two were very quickly not getting along. My feelings lay with Yossarian, who was humorous and quick, a bit wild but, like me, a big-city boy, who would rather die than be killed, he said only half jokingly one time near the end, and had made up his mind to live forever, or at least die trying. I could identify with that. From him I learned to say no. When they offered me another stripe as a promotion and another cluster to my Air Medal to fly ten more missions, I turned them down and they sent me home. I kept all the way out of his disagreements with Appleby, because I was timid, short, an enlisted man, and a Jew. It was my nature then always to make sure of my ground with new people before expressing myself, although in principle at least, if not always with the confidence I longed for, I thought myself the equal of all the others, the officers too, even of that big, outspoken Armenian bombardier who kept joking crazily that he was really an Assyrian and already practically extinct.

I was better read than all of them, I saw, and the best speller too, and smart enough, certainly, never to stress those points. Inevitably, Yossarian got lost on every one of the night missions we flew in our operational training flights over South Carolina and Georgia. It became a joke. From the other enlisted crewmen I met in the barracks and mess hall, I learned that all of their bombardiers turned navigators got lost on all of their night training flights too, and that became another joke. The third officer in our crew was a shy copilot named Kraft, who, promoted to pilot overseas, was shot down by flak on a mission over Ferrara in northern Italy when his flight went over the bridge there in a second pass and was killed. Yossarian, the lead bombardier, who'd failed to drop the first time, got a medal for that one for going round the second time when he saw the others had missed and the bridge there was still undamaged. On those navigational training missions in South Carolina, Appleby would find the way back for us safely with his radio compass. One black night we were lost and had no radio compass for more than an hour.

There was electrical interference from storms nearby, and to this day I clearly hear Yossarian's voice on the intercom, saying: "I see the bank of a river down there. Turn left and cross it and I'll pick up a landmark on the other side." The bank of that river turned out to be the shore of the Atlantic once more and took over after another half hour, and when he finally pieced together the radio signals to bring us back to our field, there was only enough fuel left to carry us from the landing strip to our plane stand. The engines died before they could be cut. We had all nearly been killed. That did not sink in until early middle age, and after that when I related the anecdote, it was not just for the laughs. In that photograph with me is a buddy, Bill Knight, the top turret gunner that day, who was about two years older than I and already married, with a baby child he had seen but a week, and a skinny kid my own age named Howard Snowden, a waist gunner and radioman from somewhere in Alabama, who would be killed on a mission to Avignon about one month later and died slowly, moaning in pain and whimpering he was cold.

We are twenty years old and look like children who are only twenty years old. Howie Snowden was the first dead human I had ever seen and the only dead human I've laid eyes on since outside a mortuary. My wife died at night and was already gone from the room by the time I arrived at the hospital to conclude the paperwork and begin the arrangements for the burial. She went the way the oncologist said she would, almsot to the day. There was skickness but seldom much pain, and we like to think she was spared that pain because she was always a very good person, at least to me, and to the children, generally cheerful and bighearted. If angry, it was only with her first husband, and only at times, particularly because he often had not enough money for child support but enough for new girlfriends and enough to marry again a couple more times.

I was lucky with dead men, said Lew right after the war, a friend since childhood who was taken prisoner as an infantryman and had seen hundreds of dead people in Europe before he was shipped back home, seen Americans and Germans, and scores of German civilians in Dresden when he was send back in to help clean up after the British firebombing I learned abont first from him, an air raid that had killed just about everyone else in the city but these prisoners of war and their guards and which I did not know about and would not immediately believe. "Above a hundred thousand? You must be crazy, Lew. That's more than Hiroshima and the atom bomb." I looked it up and admitted he was right. But that was almost fifty years ago. No wonder our progeny are not much interested in World War II. Hardly any were born then. They'd be around fifty if they were.

But maybe someday, in a future I can't try to measure, one of the children or grandchildren will happen upon that box or a drawer with my gunner's wings, Air Medal, sergeant's stripes, and wartime photograph inside and perhaps be stimulated to reflect with poignancy on some incidents of a family nature that once took place between us, or which never did and should have. Like me with my father's gas mask from World War I. I wonder what became of it. I loved that gas mask as a toy when small and I would play with it secretly when he was at work in the city cutting shapes from fabric from patterns for children's dresses. I have his photograph as a soldier too. After I read, while still in elementary school, a biography of the German World War I aerial ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen, I wished for a while to grow up to be a fighter pilot and to duel with him daily in single combat over trenches in France and shoot him down again every time. He was my hero, and I dreamed of shooting him down. Soon after the war, my war, my father died and they called it cancer. He enjoyed cigars.

He bought them in the small neighborhood shop around the corner on Surf Avenue, where a contented Mr. Levinson sat with his smile at a worktable with knives and tobacco leaves and marked out and rolled his cigars by hand, while Mrs. Levinson, a tranquil kind of pygmy of a woman with dark hair and freckles, sold bathing caps, earplugs, swimming tubes, and pails and shovels and other small trifles for the sand on the beach just one block away. They were childless. Everyone worked. As a kid I hawked newspapers for a while through the streets and boardwalk bars. In summer our sisters sold frozen custard at the stands on the boardwalk, root beer. Davey Goldsmith sold hot dogs. On the beach unlicensed noddlers battled like Spartans with dry-ice vapors misting from cumbersome cartons toted in our browned arms to dispense for a nicked all of their frozen bars and Dixie cups before they could be nabbed by policemen pursuing them on soft sand through onlookers in bathing suits rooting with all their hearts for them to make good their flight.

Many of these fleet-footed older young boys working so perilously were people I knew. From our apartment we could always hear from the ocean the breaking of waves and the gong from the bell baby (we called it the "bellboy" and the still sounds rights to the unusual quiet in the early or late afternoon, we could even hear very slightly the indistinct, ghostlike music of our closest merry-go-round, the exotic calliope of the tremendous carousel on the boardwalk with its turning ring of steeds of gold the color of caramels and painted strokes of shiny black and showy tints of blue and pink of other candies, like jelly beans, licorice, and gumdrops -- where did those magnificent gliding horses come from? was there a corporation somewhere that manufactured just horses for carousels? was there big money in that? -- almost half a mile away. No one was rich. Copyright © 1994 by Skimton, Inc. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. Fiction Book Review: Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22, a Novel by by Joseph L.

Heller, Author Simon & Schuster $24 (464p) ISBN 978-0-671-74604-9 Powell's ADVERTISEMENT Worked on for many years and long anticipated (and perhaps dreaded) by admirers of the incomparable original, Heller's ``sequel'' shares with his great WWII saga a surreal sense of the absurd and of the fatuity of most human institutions. But it is hard to avoid a sense of keen disappointment, nonetheless. The satirizing of American contemporary life has been done so frequently-and often successfully-since the 1961 Catch-22, which helped make so much of that satirizing possible, that Heller is in effect competing with himself, and failing. Here again are John Yossarian, Milo Minderbinder, Sammy Singer, Chaplain Albert Tappman, and the giant Lew. Newcomers include Washington finagler G. Noodles Cook and the mysterious and ubiquitous know-it-all Jerry Gaffney. The wartime buddies are old men now, worried about their health, their sex lives and their children, but they find 1990s civilian life as corruptly absurd as the old Air Force days.

There are flashbacks to the war, some of which recall the power of Heller's original inspiration; there are nostalgic passages about Coney Island, long Jewish dialogues that could have been penned by a whacked-out Neil Simon, bravura passages (notably, a magnificent wedding reception held at New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal) and hare-brained Pentagon meetings to discuss the new Shhhh super-quiet warplane. There are patches of vaudeville, dreamscapes, far too much sophomoric doodling, and longueurs when Heller seems simply to be filling pages. In the end, despite flashes of the old wit and fire, this is a tired, dispirited and dispiriting novel. 200,000 first printing; first serial to Playboy. (Oct.) DETAILS

Question: Closing Time was a sequel to which famous novel of 1961?
Answer: Catch 22